The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, storage devices, among others.
Presently, many networked computing services (e.g., cloud computing services) are provided through infrastructure provisioning (e.g., within a relatively static hardware pool) whereby operating systems and computer software applications can be deployed and reconfigured. In a typical cloud computing environment, application images can be installed and overwritten, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses can be modified, and real and virtual processors are allocated to meet changing resource requirements. However, challenges can exist in that cloud computing environments are typically static entities whose infrastructures are fully managed. As such, expansion and/or contraction of the cloud computing environments typically occur through standard acquisition and installation of new hardware and/or other resources. Such an approach may be inefficient and/or not economically viable.